I think Blizz made a hugh mistake with the guild achievements and the combining of the 10 and 25 man raid lockouts. The consequence of these chages is the complete lack of PUG raids. In Wrath there were PUGS going on all the time and all you needed to do was check trade chat for a few minutes to find the next raid. Many PUGS stunk but some were fantastic.

I really miss them. I think doing away with guild achievements on raids (or changing it somehow) and seperating the 10/25 lockouts would really help the game. There would be much more raids going on and alts would come more into play.

I had mixed feeling when everything was being announced. I knew it wouldn't effect my druid so much, seeing as he's always been in a fairly top server guild since I moved stateside. However, I do play alts and have a lot of trouble trying to run through normal modes with him.

I like to look at the bright side of things, everything is still pretty new and a lot of people really think being in a high level guild with perks allows for content to be killed easier. Of course that statement is not true at all. Eventually I see the pugs coming back and being successful, there are many successful pugs on my server that manage to go 9 bosses or higher in T11 content. Hopefully once the dust settles and everyone gains the rep to buy their heirloom gear and dark phoenix mounts most people will start looking else where to fill their raid needs.

On my shitty server we have pugs - BoT trash runs, BH, Conclave and occasionally doing BWL. You'll see more as people get more comfortable and people get more gear. You'll see even more when ZA/ZG come out and increase the relative level of gear, and I think you'll see quite a few when 4.2 comes out (especially if the old raids add valor points).

Eh, I only miss pugs to the extent that my alts don't really get to raid (although my guild has started an alt raid night now, so that's not much of an issue anymore). But yeah, other than that I'm fine never having to pug again, guild runs ftw lol.

The older content will have to be done in PUGS, much like Ulduar was when LK was around. But in Wrath you saw PUGS for current content almost from the day it came out. At least on my server there were a few really good players that ran PUGS and did a good job in them. I just don't see that. I'm not talking about BH PUGS as those can easily be compared to the previous BG PUGS of Wrath. And as you said even alts are more guild raid then not. Can anyone hosestly say that they see the same amount of trade chat looking for PUGS as they did in the past?

Finally, if a guild needs to PUG a few players they are asking you to join their guild for that night in order to raid. The whole guild achievement thing is hurting and not helping the guy who likes to raid but be in a guild of friends that like to do different things.

Oh no, there aren't nearly as many pugs for normal mode content as there were. I attribute that to mostly the difficulty of the content.

We saw tons of pugs on normal mode when there were, like, only 4 bosses on icecrown and those bosses were easy as pie. (and LDW was a pug killer, IIRC, before they nerfed her). Pugs that lasted past DBS were pretty rare for my server until well into the icecrown buff, and the only ones that were successful were ones that were run by alts of the best guild and vetted everyone that came.

Until there's some 30% buff on everything or people can get awesome gear easily via JP, you're just not going to see that many pugs. I think the amount of pugs was overstated and you're remembering when things hit 30%, not when things came out. Or, simply, there's no real replacement for the first four boss easiness.

It is true that the number of PUGS increased as the buffs went from 10 to 20 and finally to 30%. But looking back I remember PUGS going on a month after Wrath came out for bosses in Naxx (spider wing for example). Ulduar was less PUGS especially if you didn't count LV boss. But then many players hated Ulduar and even in full LK gear people never really did much there.

But the next set TOC had PUGS all day long. I remember clearing that place in 10 and 25 man PUGS. My heroic kills there were in PUGS. Finally along came ICC. It was released in phases but even before the second set was released there were PUGS for rep, PUGS for the first 4 bosses (remember all the fights over the trinket). The number of PUGS just kept on growing.

Maybe that was because gear was easier to get (gear score addon and all that crap). Or maybe because the fights were easier. But at leaset on the server I'm on, and from what I heard some other servers, there are few if any PUGS. What I do see is people needing someone but it is filling in a spot or two for a guild run. Or they try to force you to join the guild so the guild get kill credits.

In the past many guilds didn't want your alts or could care less where your alts were at. Now it seems many guilds want you alts in the guild. All of this just seems to reek from the guild rep that they put in place. And I really believe that it has a big part in the rarity of PUGS.

It is true that the number of PUGS increased as the buffs went from 10 to 20 and finally to 30%. But looking back I remember PUGS going on a month after Wrath came out for bosses in Naxx (spider wing for example). Ulduar was less PUGS especially if you didn't count LV boss. But then many players hated Ulduar and even in full LK gear people never really did much there.

People hated Ulduar?

Wow.

Naxx PUGS make sense because that shit was easy as dirt. Same with pugs for ToC. There were fewer pugs for ICC because it was harder - and yeah, there were the fewest pugs for Ulduar because it was the hardest.

Ulduar and T11 are pretty similar in difficulty (especially for a PUG), complexity and brutal forcing people to play as much as they can to down stuff. I honestly don't think many people out there _want_ to run multiple versions of the same stuff.

T11 is hard. It's the hardest entry level stuff they've done for a long time and probably ever. And it is decidedly unfriendly for PUGs. Almost nothing is a DPS race and certainly nothing early. I mean, think about doing Omnotron in a pug without voice chat. And you have to do that to get to the decidedly easier (or at least less complex) Chim and Mal. BoT is easier but has about an hour of trash to go through. Conclave is fairly simple if you have people that listen, but almost impossible if you don't (plus the loot is horrible, so no one cares).

I don't think guild rep or fewer alts or what have you have really any bearing on it. I think it's that the stuff is hard and complex and full of ways that an individual fail wipes the raid. And it's not like they can just grind gear to make it easier or wait for a buff, either. Even with great gear, most of the fights are hard because of complexity, not because of tank/dps/healing gear marks.

Sylvaneart wrote:I know it is a big PUG killer but I really miss attunments. Bring them back for current content then remove them once the next tier is released. I love the quest lines and such.

Ironically, even though I started playing at the end of BC pretty much, I'd love to see the idea of attunments back in the game (and not just some half ass crap like Maly/EoE drop from Sapp was). From what I've heard, they were some pretty epic questlines back then that gave great insight into the story as well as loot for getting raid prepped, unlike today where any scrub can wander on in...granted, I don't wish for any attunment to essentially lock out people completely, but maybe something fun to do before you get on in and such.

I really miss attunments. What I don't miss was having to run them over and over when you got new people in your guild. It made recruiting a chore because you had to weigh if this person is worth taking a raid night to get them attuned if they didn't already have it.

What I would like to see an attunment around heroics. This would make sure that pugs could still continue. The trick would be that the attunment would be a guild achivment. As soon as the guild had the attunment anyone in that guild could get access to that content. What this would give us is something for serious guilds to strive for with out all the headache that came along with it. Back when BC had all of those requirements guilds are not what they are today. Lets have something interesting to do with our guilds once they reach level 25.

Yes people hated Ulduar. It was one onf the lower experienced raids in WOW. Even after you outgeared it people just didn't like doing it for some reason. That said there were still PUGS advertised in trade for it. Same for ICC. Yes they didn't get far at the start but every week I saw people in trade setting up an ICC or Ulduar run. I don't see that in Cata, as least no where close to the amount for Wrath raids.

On attunements I have mixed feelings. I hate to waste time. And mindless grinding just to enter a raid doesn't seem fun. Now if that grinding awarded a real cool weapon that helped your DPS/heals/mitigation then heck yea. And the attunement needs to be soloable. The TBC attunement required the reliance on too many other people. That meant as the top sets moved on there was no one left to help the next batch. It created a hugh gulf in where people were at. Some were on BT/Hyjal etc while others stuck at Kara.

Yes people hated Ulduar. It was one onf the lower experienced raids in WOW.

These two statements don't necessarily go together. The primary reason that Ulduar wasn't particularly well-experienced was that it was hard - and that meant that people didn't get to finish it by the time ToC came out. Since ToC was so amazingly easy, everyone moved to it right away. Then after they were done with ToC there was no real need to go back and do Ulduar, and it's a lot harder to motivate most people if there isn't loot there.

Polls asking what the best raid instance has been are overwhelmingly positive towards Ulduar and overwhelmingly negative towards ToC, yet the number of people who completed them are the opposite. The correlation is not there. Similarly when Naxx first came out it had overwhelmingly positive ratings, but not enough people got to see it because of the brutal requirements to get into it and succeed when you were there.

Blizzard recognizes that they messed up with Ulduar/ToC timing and corrected it with T11 vs Firelands. There's a reason for that.

I'm referring to PUGS advertised in trade chat. Even at the end of ICC I saw tons of PUGS to do Naxx for the various achievements, tons of PUGS for TOC but only one or two for Ulduar. I know cause I was trying to get that mimi mount.

While I have no solid proof, Ulduar took too long to really do in my opinion. You could go 10/12 HM ICC faster then getting to the last boss in Ulduar. Just getting to LV took way too long. Also the fights while not hard (especially after getting heroic ICC gear) still took much longer to do than other raids.

BTW my comment that people hated it and it was one of the lower experienced raids makes perfect sense. If people hate it they tend not to go back and therefore have less of a chance to see the other fights there. This was shown in how few actually wanted to try for the mount.

I think way more people got to at least try the LK fight (which by the way was really a cool and fun fight) then ever got to try fighting Yogg-Saron or Algalon. And while I fought heroic LK at least 6 times (I confess I never killed him in heroic) I only had one try against Algalon. Same goes for number of kills (LK at least 5 times, Yogg-Saron twice and that was AFTER my first LK kill).

But this is about PUGS. After my 10 man guild broke up in August I was still able to do ICC every week on my main and alts. It didn't matter what guild I was in or even if I was in a guild. And back in January 2010 PUGS were all over the place doing TOC and ICC runs.

Some people complained that gear was too easy to get and end content was too easy to get to see. That always grated me as being an elitist. So Blizz said Cata would be much harder. But in doing it they took the hard parts that we liked (actual boss fights, kitty rotations) and instead made more rep grinding, gear grinding and fights that favored certain types of classes. Yea the fight is hard to DPS if you can't get to the boss or if you are melee you are getting hit by AOE damage.

I think they missed the boat with the raid lockouts being combined, guild rep and too much changes to existing classes. If you look around on the forums you see tons of posts and threads about how fast people became dissatisfied with this expansion.

While I have no solid proof, Ulduar took too long to really do in my opinion. You could go 10/12 HM ICC faster then getting to the last boss in Ulduar. Just getting to LV took way too long. Also the fights while not hard (especially after getting heroic ICC gear) still took much longer to do than other raids.

Yeah, that wasn't my experience. There wasn't a large amount of trash and certainly nothing as bad as the Val-Sin trash crap. Multiple bosses were completely skippable in Ulduar; I mean, to get to Yogg you had to do Lev, XT, Kolo, Auiraya, the 4 watchers and Vezax. 9 bosses with very little trash. The most annoying trash pulls were probably Freya and maybe the Vezax run, but after you outgeared things that went super fast. We cleared that in a bit less than 90 min every week at most.

With the 30% buff you could definitely do 10/12 ICC faster, but certainly not 11/12. 2 hours was really pushing it to get to LK.

Plus there was nothing requiring you to do any of the fights on hard mode if you wanted to do Yogg-0. We rarely did anything hard mode unless we did it accidentally.

BTW my comment that people hated it and it was one of the lower experienced raids makes perfect sense. If people hate it they tend not to go back and therefore have less of a chance to see the other fights there. This was shown in how few actually wanted to try for the mount.

It could make sense, but it doesn't need to be the case. Again, Ulduar is one of the highest-rated raids they've ever done. Almost everyone says that it was one of the best raids Blizzard has ever done, and most everyone says that it was the best raid in WotLK. The fact that fewer people did it doesn't mean that people hated it. It would make sense that if people hated it that it was done less, but the fact is that people hated the hell out of ToC but it was done more than any other raid in WotLK.

The fact that it wasn't done as much does not imply that it was hated. Any more than Sunwell being barely completed before 3.0 implies that it was hated, or that Naxx being done by like no one before BC implies that it was hated.

Some people complained that gear was too easy to get and end content was too easy to get to see. That always grated me as being an elitist. So Blizz said Cata would be much harder. But in doing it they took the hard parts that we liked (actual boss fights, kitty rotations) and instead made more rep grinding, gear grinding and fights that favored certain types of classes. Yea the fight is hard to DPS if you can't get to the boss or if you are melee you are getting hit by AOE damage.

Gear was too easy to get and content was fairly easy to see. ToC runs with ICC gear were super, super easy. ICC runs when you were just doing the first four bosses were super easy; I mean, ICC had gunship.

Here's the facts: Ulduar was the best rated raid in WotLK. Blizzard saw this. They made Cataclysm T11 much more like Ulduar. Result is that the people that are raiding are liking it quite a bit and finding it very challenging, but the side effect is that it discourages PuGs. But even then, there are plenty of PuGs doing Conclave or at least BoT on my shitty server, and my server's all but dead.

I do agree that having different loot drop from 25s and 10s as well as having no shared lockout means that people are less inclined to do PuGs because there isn't as much incentive in doing so. Why bother running a 25 when you can do a 10? Why bother running the content twice when you can do it just once? But I don't see that as bad at all.

I don't see rep and guild grinding as a big reason why PuGs are gone. Rep is ridiculously easy to get and has nothing to do with raids. Guild rep doesn't matter either. The biggest detrimient is the shared lockout; you won't save yourself to a raid you'll do with guildies. But that just reduces raids in general.

I also don't think it has much to do with class balance, at least on normal modes. On hard modes sure, melee gets hosed, but on normal it hardly matters - and in a PuG it doesn't matter at all. P

Ultimately I think most people are dissatisfied because they were used to a certain level of difficulty and Cataclysm is harder than that. When you become accustomed to being able to do heroics in 10 minutes and faceroll your way to ICC titles without any real knowledge of your class or spec, when that becomes harder you get dissatisfied. That was a big mistake on Blizzard's part, but I wouldn't attribute that to rep grinding or guild rep or even shared lockouts. It's because this is hard, and hard stuff isn't often as much fun for many people as easier stuff is.

I do think that Blizzard erred on the side of too hard for normal mode content. I suspect Firelands will have it easier on normal. I also think the hard modes - or at least some of them - started out too easy. Mostly, I think they needed some form of gating or limited attempts; having guilds be able to do as much as they could and be limited only by their time was a real stress.